The haunting of classics in the Dark Academia aesthetic

Abstract

You are learning Latin past midnight in the glow of nothing but your table-lamp, Claude Debussy playing in the background. A cup of coffee, half drunk, sits forgotten on your table because you are so engrossed in the Latin phrases. Your hair is kept away from your eyes with a ribbon and your hands are stained with the ink of your fountain pen.

(Tumblr user @almost-rory-gilmore (2020)

Dark Academia — an internet aesthetic that centres around dark colours, macabre themes, and the trappings of learnedness — came of age during a boom in online aesthetics in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its beginnings, however, can be traced back to the early 2010s, when a fandom on the website Tumblr took root around one of Dark Academia’s foundational texts: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992).¹ The novel tells the story of a group of Ancient Greek students at a small US liberal arts college whose close friendship leads them to get involved with Bacchic rituals — and eventually murder. Although plenty of adherents engage with Dark Academia without having read The Secret History, the elements of this plot remain at the heart of the aesthetic, and the book itself is constantly referenced. From this Tumblr fan community, Dark Academia content spread to other visually oriented social media platforms: Pinterest, Instagram, and finally TikTok, which also experienced fast growth in its user base during COVID.² Though it is difficult to certify any demographic data from these social media platforms, scholars have observed that the main populations engaging with Dark Academia seem to be women and LGBTQ+ members of Gen Z (those born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, who are now in their late teens and early twenties).³

The hashtag #DarkAcademia has over 2.2 million Instagram posts and over 2.1 billion views on TikTok.⁴ In my sample of the top 100 TikTok videos under the #DarkAcademia tag, about one-third (32) contained some sort of classical reference.⁵ This means Dark Academia/Classics content reaches millions more people than traditional scholarship — including current and potential students and colleagues. Indeed, as Horgan (2021) asserts:

Writing about youth trends tends to affirm or disaffirm whatever the kids are doing: Gen Z will either save us or doom us, dark academia for all or for nobody. But taking youth trends and culture seriously means more deeply engaging with the underlying assumptions in youth culture’s social practices.

In the past few years, researchers from English, History, Comparative Literature, Sociology, and Culture Studies, among others, have begun interrogating internet aesthetics as cultural phenomena that implicate their own disciplines, as well as the structures of academia writ large. Adriaansen (2022: 106) explores Dark Academia from a cultural–historical perspective, calling it a practice of counter-curation that rejects the hegemony and pragmatism of contemporary higher education. It is a movement of resistance, argues Quiring (2021), against the instrumentalization of the humanities required by the neoliberal corporate university. Dark Academia cultivates nostalgia for an imaginary past to cope with real, ongoing problems in the present.

Nguyen (2022: 61) picks up on this nostalgic impulse as well, identifying a collective nostalgic fantasy at the core of Dark Academia that forges group identity and offers a point of focus for solidarity — something students were desperately seeking during COVID lockdown. These same students, Nguyen argues, are ‘weary of the reality that an education in the arts and humanities offers no future security’ (58) and find Dark Academia ‘attractive because it is attainable by anyone, unlike an expensive degree fraught with complications, including debt and post graduation job uncertainty’ (66). With social media as its gallery space, internet aesthetics like Dark Academia democratize and decentralize the practice of collection and curation, once a means of aestheticizing the self that was restricted to the privileged ranks of wealthy, educated male elite.⁶ As Quiring writes, ‘You don’t need the Ivy League to read Ovid. In fact, reading The Metamorphoses with your online friends might be better, more joyful, than reading it at a top-notch school’. Ovid and Classics can function in the aesthetic as emblematic of the humanities as a whole, synecdoche for the broad liberal arts education that led to the formation of Great Books programmes in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This brings us back to Classics. In this article, I offer an understanding of Dark Academia from the perspective of the discipline of Classics — specifically, via Classical reception. Using James Uden’s model of reception as ‘haunting’, I argue that Dark Academia interacts with the ancient world in a similar way to the Gothic: through a series of fragmentary references that invoke the idea of ‘Classics’ more than any particular text, artwork, or mythological figure from antiquity. I contend, however, that this does not mean we should discount it as superficial or frivolous; as Saito argues, the aesthetics of the everyday are necessary and can have surprisingly serious implications.⁷ On the contrary, Dark Academia’s double reception — of Classical antiquity itself, and of the field of Classical academia — is a two-edged sword: powerful in its potential as a means of engagement with a public curious about the ancient world, but dangerous in its reinforcement of existing structural inequities in the discipline.

Internet aesthetics and Stimmung

The sense of ‘aesthetic’ at work in Dark Academia has diverged somewhat from the philosophical and academic sense⁸ of the term. The Aesthetics Wiki, an open-source website that collects examples of various internet aesthetics, provides a definition on its ‘Aesthetics 101’ page:

The word ‘aesthetic’ originated as the philosophical discussion about what beauty is, how we should approach it, and why it exists. Later, the academic field of art history used aesthetic to refer to a set of principles motivating artists and certain periods of art history. However, Millennials and Generation Z started using that term as an adjective that describes what they personally consider beautiful. For example: ‘After Denise finished watching The Virgin Suicides, she said, ‘Wow. That was so aesthetic”’.

Different internet aesthetics embody different concepts of beauty, typically by bringing together cultural materials — images, artwork, music — that already exist in some form (Giolo and Berghman 2023). In this sense, they are curatorial rather than purely creative; the practitioner is a strategic bricoleur who ‘limits, excludes, and creates meaning with existing signs, codes, and materials’ (Hoffmann 2015: 33).⁹ Indeed, in the virtual environment of the internet, the bricoleur is more adept than the scholar or intellectual at handling, dismantling, and reassembling information (Papson 2014: 387–8). Thus, in this paper, I will refer to the producers of Dark Academia content as ‘curators’, rather than use the label of ‘creators’ that is more frequently applied to those who post mainly original or unique content on social media.

As Murray writes in her examination of Dark Academia and readerly self-fashioning, online aesthetics are, ‘less a cohesive movement or delimited subculture than a loose cluster of atmospherics and “vibes”.’ (2023: 348). Their lack of coherence allows for individual subjectivity to reign supreme, despite the communities around particular aesthetics growing increasingly large. Giolo and Berghman (2023) observe that ‘the greater openness of Internet aesthetics (compared to genres or styles) might be explained by the impossibility of objectively denying that certain objects exemplify someone’s experience of an Internet aesthetic’. Participants rarely, if ever, litigate their choices of content or challenge those of others; if a spiral staircase embodies Dark Academia for one person, then so be it. Yet there is still a sense of shared identity among adherents to a particular aesthetic, leading many to add their own aesthetic labels to their social media bios. Identifying with one aesthetic does not preclude others — one can be a fan of both Dark Academia and, for example, Cottagecore, a rather opposite aesthetic that prizes pastel colours and a simple countryside lifestyle; yet there is a unifying element within each aesthetic community.

Adriaansen (2022: 110) argues that internet aesthetics are unified by their affective curation of Stimmung, an ‘atmosphere’, ‘mood’, or ‘vibe’. Although Stimmung originally has a musical derivation (from Stimme, ‘voice’, and stimmen, ‘to tune an instrument’), it understands listening as an affective behaviour involving the entire body and its inner feelings, rather than just the ears.¹⁰ Its origins in the feelings and sensations of the physical body make Stimmung a useful lens for examining internet aesthetics, which combine music with art, literature, film, and other media that engage multiple senses at once. Because Dark Academia is a primarily visual aesthetic, I refer to those who interact with its content as ‘spectators’ rather than ‘readers’ or ‘audience’. The former privileges text as the principal medium; the latter, hearing as its primary sense. Wellbery (2018: 17) writes that Stimmungen, in their conceptualization from the nineteenth century onwards, ‘stand out for their ephemeral, changeable character that mirrors the fluctuations of subjectivity’. This aspect suits online aesthetics in their focus on individual affect and the primacy of subjective personal experience. Gumbrecht (2008: 216) defines ‘reading for the Stimmung’ as being ‘sensitive to the modes in which texts, as meaning realities and material realities, quite literally surround their readers, both physically and emotionally’. This translates well from text to the various forms of visual media that constitute internet aesthetics — some of which, in the case of rooms or other environments physically decorated in the aesthetic, do literally surround their spectators in real space.

The Dark Academic Stimmung

Dark Academia relies on visual signifiers of certain ideas surrounding classical literature and romanticized intellectualism—darkness in subject matter as well as colour palette. It has been described as ‘bookish; university-based; Eurocentric; and dandyish’ (Murray 2023: 349). Its settings include college campuses — especially those with Gothic architecture — historic houses, art galleries/museums, bookstores, library interiors, and studies. The rooms are typically filled with markers of the educated Western upper class: spiral staircases, leather armchairs, antiques, busts, and tapestries. On the desks rest piles of leather-bound books, quill pens and ink, sheet music, typewriters, globes, hourglasses, snippets of Ancient Greek and Latin writing, tea or coffee, and, as Murray identifies, ‘occasional skulls’ (350). Content on TikTok and Instagram includes fashion and style tips, room tours, fan edits of films, book recommendations, and montages of campuses. The weather is always grey, the season always autumn, and the filters always conspicuously sepia-toned. Dark Academia’s namesake ‘darkness’, then, refers not only to this sepia and grey colour palette that provides a recognizable visual landscape, but also to its ‘air of mystery, artistic irrationalism, Romantic madness, and … murder’ (Adriaansen 2022: 109).

Where does Classics come in? Perhaps the scene is best set in the post quoted at the start of this article, complete with Latin, coffee, and Claude Debussy. The evocative description draws spectators in immediately by addressing them in the second person. With each clause, spectators’ images of themselves become clearer and more detailed. As it slowly incorporates all five senses in three short sentences, the vignette presents not just an image of Dark Academia, but its affective Stimmung: first Latin, then darkness — sight — then a single light, then music — sound — coffee — taste, and perhaps smell — then nostalgia, the coffee is forgotten, the sensation of hair around your eyes — touch — and ink on your hands. Nevertheless, though Latin nominally plays a prominent role in this set piece, there is no engagement with the language itself, nor with any translations, specific works or authors, or even any notable phrases. Common visual engagement is with statuary, often of gods and goddesses, and mythological depictions — the fodder of museum galleries and libraries in historical houses.

This is the type of Classical reception we see in Dark Academia. In text-based posts, we encounter references to Latin or Ancient Greek rather than any direct interaction with the languages. In one Tumblr post, a catalogue of features of ‘my kind of academia’ includes ‘cigarette trousers, beige shirts and tweed blazers’ and ‘pouring redbull into coffee, telling myself that everything is fine’ alongside ‘candle-lit room with books all over the floor, planning an intricate essay on why Latin is not dead’.¹¹ Like many Dark Academia text posts, the list lacks capital letters or auto-formatting, giving it a casual tone and appearance. The syntax of each bullet point does not need to match: some are participial phrases, while others are comprised of one or more nouns with descriptive adjectives. Consider a similar Tumblr post advertising ‘dark academia tips’¹²:

Dark Academia tips:

• - listen to Mozart while drinking black coffee

• - wear big cashmere sweaters

• - being secretly in love with your best friend

• - look at the moon, sitting on the balcony

• - smoking while watching black and white old films

• - spend the evening in the library

• - read Odyssey and discuss it with your friends

• - have a large black coat

• - recite poems, sitting in a room lit by candles

• - always have a book with yourself

• - wear a lot of silver jewellery

• - know someone’s secret

This post also eschews capital letters; however, it additionally includes imperatives (‘recite poems’, ‘wear big cashmere sweaters’) and more abstract instructions than the previous post (‘know someone’s secret’, ‘being secretly in love with your best friend’). Amidst all this, one is instructed to ‘read Odyssey and discuss it with your friends’.

This same type of surface-level reference appears in visual representations of Dark Academia as well. Mood boards, or collections of images in a similar colour palette that attempt to convey a certain Stimmung, often include objects that signify antiquity without engaging meaningfully with their context. Although they originated in the realm of visual arts and design, mood boards have become a staple for content producers of various online aesthetics, providing a recognizable template for curating images. In one mood board on Tumblr, images of columns, museums, and marble statuary combine to emphasize the Classical in the Dark Academic Stimmung, enhanced by a quote beneath them attributed to Socrates: ‘One thing I know, that I know nothing. This is the source of my wisdom’.¹³ Yet upon closer examination, we see that the columns are modern construction; the piled-up books are contemporary English novels; and the busts are so generic or so filtered that we can hardly identify their subjects. The line attributed to Socrates is not a direct quote, but at best a paraphrase of Plat. Apol. 22d, συνῄδη οὐδὲν ἐπισταμένῳ (‘I understood that I knew nothing’), with the second sentence liberally added. Another Tumblr user declares that ‘art museums, classic poetry, and Greek mythology is the holy trinity of Dark academia’.¹⁴ Yet images of museums are often more focused on spirited youths running through their corridors than on the artwork, while engagement with mythology is signified by the word ‘Mythology’ on book spines.

The superficiality of these engagements is reminiscent of what Hardwick (2011: 56) identifies as ‘fuzzy connections’: moments that ‘creat[e] for the reader a simultaneity of experience that brings together the ancient and the new… even if the reader does not have detailed knowledge of [their] associations’. Both the curator who posts an image of a ‘Mythology’ book and the spectator who views the post are engaging with antiquity, whether or not they know anything about mythology at all. The Dark Academia content curator acts as a connector or ‘carrier’ of ‘referents and images from the ancient world that pass into the poetic memory without necessarily being given attributions by the reader who hears and views and feels them’ (Hardwick 2011: 50). Consciously or unconsciously, the Stimmung of Dark Academia triggers spectators’ affective responses and shapes their constructions of meaning¹⁵ and of identity. If this Stimmung is comprised of otherwise-disconnected bits and pieces, perhaps meaning and identity are also disjointed and disunified for Dark Academia fans, much as their worlds may have felt during isolation in the pandemic.

We see the same phenomenon of cursory, fragmentary references to Classics in the graphics and quizzes shared by Dark Academia curators. In an Instagram post by Sydney Decker¹⁶, a ‘Choose your Fighter’ graphic gives you a point towards ‘Vivian’ if you are ‘obsessed with Greek mythology’ — but Vivian also uses black pens, and, if you love to study in cafes, you could actually be ‘Sylvia’ (2020a). The questionnaire format directly involves the spectator in an interactive experience — much like the use of the second person in the first set piece above. The resulting identification with one Dark Academia persona over another is equated, in the bottom row of text, with other common group identities claimed in online spaces: one’s Hogwarts house, often also determined by a user-driven personality quiz; zodiac sign; and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, determined officially by psychological assessment but unofficially by numerous internet self-tests. Yet the options for one’s final identity are narrow: all three choices are female-coded, and all three outfits involve skirts, tweed, and a grey-brown colour palette. Similarly, the identity options at the bottom of the quiz are prescribed: one does not have the option to dislike Harry Potter, or to disavow astrological signs altogether. Incidentally, the influence of Harry Potter — particularly the film versions — permeates Dark Academia’s fashion and design choices; as one Reddit user commented, ‘It’s not often admitted, but an entire generation growing up wishing they’d gone to Hogwarts is probably the single biggest reason that the dark academia style exists today’.¹⁷

In another Instagram post, also by Decker¹⁸, the descriptions of ‘Dark Academia Hobbies’ are all written in lowercase and in the imperative, again directly addressing and involving the spectator on a casual, familiar level. One of five approved hobbies is to learn a dead language, ‘even when others oppose while stating its “uselessness.”’ While the idea of Classics occupies a central space here, it is not privileged above the other components of the aesthetic; other, less time-intensive hobby options including writing a letter to your future lover and putting it in an envelope sealed with wax, or sketching people’s faces.

Notably, the hobbies all involve print media. None of them include scrolling through TikTok watching Dark Academia videos or curating your own Dark Academia mood board. Murray picks up on this inherent contradiction in an online aesthetic that glorifies the analogue, reading hypocrisy into the paradox of Dark Academia’s cultivated ‘bookishness’, or its engagement with the physicality of the book within the context of a heavily digital culture (348). Indeed, the very existence of the aesthetic would not be possible without the social media that has propelled it into the mainstream, from the dusty corners of Tumblr to the (print and digital versions of) the New York Times.¹⁹ We see a similar avoidance of the virtual world in Dark Academia quizzes:

This Instagram quiz quoted above (Figure 1), created by @hellyeahruna, excludes any activity related to computers or the internet — where, of course, the quiz itself exists (2020). It invites spectators to study Latin if they prefer Cicero to Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen, but also if they prefer a beige trench coat to a plaid blazer or corduroy pants, or perfectionism to punctuality and patience.

Figure 1:

Text of an Instagram quiz, ‘Dark Academia: What should you study according to your aesthetic?’ by @hellyeahruna.

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Some content digs even deeper into the world of print books. If someone wants to commit to Dark Academia beyond personality quizzes and fun graphics, curators offer curated reading lists. One list features ancient texts, like the poetry of Sappho and the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as well as modern works of reception that directly engage with Classics, like Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) and The Secret History itself.²⁰ This is one example of the doubleness of Dark Academia’s reception. These Classics-themed works are mixed in with other English literary ‘classics’ of varying genres and lengths, like Anna Karenina, Murder on the Orient Express, and Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’. These lists showcase the importance of subjectivity to Dark Academia: the curator selects books that create, in their mind, a Dark Academic Stimmung. In visual content, this is often influenced by the appearance of the book covers themselves, but in text-based lists, curators can choose to collect books that, due to their subject matter or literary period, are typically kept separate. Quiring (2021) reflects on the reading list phenomenon thus:

The archive of dark academia combines Great Books with contemporary novels in a way that reflects the sinister implications of the classic curriculum. The pairing exemplifies dark academia’s tendency to celebrate the inherent appeal of the Western canon while simultaneously deconstructing it.

Yet Dark Academia curators figure and refigure their own literary canons again and again, in ways that need not accord with the lists of other content curators, and without pronouncing upon their choices or explicating them. That is, they undertake what could be considered academic work in a decidedly non-academic way.

Gothic haunting in Dark Academia

Dark Academia is not the first phenomenon to challenge longstanding ideas of what it means to engage with antiquity. In his monograph Spectres of Antiquity (2020), Uden identifies Gothic literature as one of these phenomena. Gothic’s interaction with Classics is different from direct inspiration by or reinterpretation of a specific ancient myth, literary work, or historical event. Instead, Uden (2020: 4) writes, it represents the classical world as ‘sinister remnants, hollowed-out versions of a formerly prestigious discourse’. Although Uden describes literature written over two hundred years ago, his words are apropos to our discussion of Dark Academia — an aesthetic that draws inspiration from the Gothic itself. Indeed, the book piles displayed on Dark Academic desks often feature the very titles that Uden analyses in his monograph²¹, as well as quotes like the following from a Tumblr post by @sapphic-dark-academia: ‘oh to be running around a dark castle in the dead of night with the train of my gown trailing behind me’.²² In Gothic literature, Uden (233) writes, ‘Frequently we observe not the conscious adoption of entire ideas from ancient texts but … the fractured fragments of ancient discourse, sometimes consciously manipulated, often inherited or imposed’. It seems the writers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novels had something in common with the twenty-first-century content curators of Tumblr and Instagram.²³

Uden (231) calls this mode of reception, which he introduces only in the afterword to his book, a ‘haunting’:

The notion of the classical legacy as a haunting aims precisely to convey a sense of the accumulated authority that cannot be reduced to individual encounters, and that seems to become more powerful even as knowledge of ancient culture becomes more vestigial. ‘Haunting’ describes a force that is more than textual.

The supratextual force described here is reminiscent of Dark Academia’s affective Stimmung, in which the Classical can inspire sensation and emotion in spectators without them consciously knowing that they are interacting with it. We can use this model of reception as haunting to further compare Gothic literature and Dark Academia — to read Dark Academia itself as a reception of the Gothic. But Dark Academia goes even deeper: it is also a reception of the academic study of Classics and of the Gothic. Its mode of haunting/reception is twofold: Dark Academia is a reception of the thing itself — antiquity and Gothic literature — but also of our academic study of those things. With each layer, we move one step further away from the original, creating this fractured, vestigial spectre, both of antiquity and of the discipline of Classics.

Furthermore, the very metaphor of haunting also has a double meaning in the context of Classical academia. In a 2020 lecture, Padilla Peralta (2020) presented the metaphor of Classics as a haunted house — a master’s house haunted by the ghosts of enslaved people — whose frame was built upon pillars of violence, exclusion, imperialism, and colonialism. The house’s structural integrity and durability would rely in the future, he argued, on ‘a critical reassessment of the racial histories and politics of Classics — and on the ghosts that swirl around its edges’. As Peralta argues, Classicists ‘take pride in bringing blood to the ghosts’ of the past — but this offering ‘is pre- and overdetermined by racial constructs that foreground some spectral presences and shut out others. In other words, the field’s capacity to admit ghosts into its midst is regulated … by the racial investments of the living.’ What does this double haunting mean for Dark Academia’s double reception of Classics?

To begin to address this question, I start by excavating the first layer of the two: Dark Academia’s reception of the Gothic’s reception of Classics. Discussions of the Gothic often begin with The Castle of Otranto (1764), written by Horace Walpole and typically considered the first Gothic novel. Though it is not a Classical adaptation, nor is it classicizing in the way that some 18^th century literature reified antiquity, Otranto and Walpole’s other writing reveals a Classical haunting. Uden (57) argues:

Walpole replaces an earlier … mode of classical imitation and emulation with one of collection. Classical objects, phrases, and ideas are detached from their original context, fragmented, and playfully set in startling and disorienting juxtapositions. Walpole’s disassembly of familiar elements of classical culture draws attention to the author’s own ability to manipulate signs of aristocratic status and also communicates a sense of estrangement from the classical world ...

Like Walpole’s literary collections, Dark Academia is defined ‘not by the rejection of the classical but by its irreverent rearrangement’ (57). The cavalier attitude of the aesthetic towards images of antiquity — busts made into erasers scattered haphazardly on a table, quotes by Ovid taken completely out of context and printed on a sweatshirt — ‘challenge the authority of the classical through acts of radical rearrangement’.

Take, for example, an image from @edwardian-masquerade’s mood board:²⁴ an ancient-styled, marble-looking bust sits atop a pile of books, spines unreadable except for The Secret History and another Dark Academia foundational text, M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (2017). The image is cropped so that only the chin and shoulders of the bust are visible — but if you look in the mirror behind it, you can see the face from the side. No clear hierarchy exists among the items strewn across the desk; the bust is arguably just as important — or trivial — as the teacup full of probably coffee, or the cupholder labelled ‘COFFEE’ that is instead full of pens. The bust is disjointed, reflected, broken up, part of a collection of items one can purchase to evoke the Dark Academia Stimmung.

Consumerism leads to another example of Classical haunting in Dark Academia, one in which we can partake outside of social media. We, too, can challenge antiquity’s legacy through radical rearrangement by purchasing Dark Academia products like ‘Matte Vintage Dark Academia Latin Phrases Sixty-Four Sticker Pack for Journaling, Bullet Journal, Travel Journal, Junk Planner, Ephemera’, previously available on Etsy for only $5.25 but since sold out. The pack of paper strips includes phrases like esse est percipi and in libras libertas, the fodder of coffee table books of quotations that are detached from any text or author, if they can even be traced to one.²⁵ The product description notes that ‘phrases can be cut to create new sentences or can be left as is’, further allowing consumers to replicate the fragmentation and reassembly of texts. Indeed, Uden’s description of Walpole could plausibly read as a product review for these Dark Academia phrases. They ‘detach myths, characters, and even phrases from Latin and Greek literature and stitch them back together with a deliberate sense of disorder. Revered examples of antique virtue appear deprived of any meaning or importance.’ Perhaps the key difference is that the meaning and importance is left up to the consumer to presume — a consumer who may have no knowledge of antiquity or Latin, and thus no idea of what a particular phrase actually means.

We can draw another parallel between the Dark Academia curator and Mary Shelley’s Gothic character Mathilda. Mathilda’s eponymous novella was written from 1819–20²⁶ — shortly after the deaths of two of Shelley’s young children at the ages of one and three years old, and shortly after Shelley herself read Vergil’s Georgics. The narrator is Mathila herself, a young woman telling the story of her father’s incestuous love for her, his eventual suicide, and her own eventual demise. Throughout the story, the lonely Mathilda imagines her own friendships with historical and literary characters before imagining herself as the characters. ‘I began’, she narrates, ‘to lose my individuality in the crowd that had existed before me’.²⁷

Uden (212) posits that Mathilda is ‘forced to struggle through a constant and excessive figuration as someone else. As soon as Mathilda-as-Oedipus is fixed in our mind, she then becomes Mathilda-as-Psyche, then Mathilda-as-Proserpine, while her father wants her to be Mathilda-as-Beatrice, or even Mathilda-as-Aeneas … the literary comparisons are not clear pictures but fleeting refractions on a translucent surface.’ For the Gen Z teen during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dark Academia community represented an opportunity to connect with others virtually in a way that was not physically possible.²⁸ This virtual connection was important for identity formation at both the individual and the group levels. As Nguyen (2022: 61) argues, ‘In the same way that individual nostalgia is constitutive of identity at a personal level, collective nostalgia forges group identity and offers a point of focus for solidarity.'

The popularity of interactive Dark Academia content — personality quizzes, listicles, choose-your-adventure-style graphics — encourages participants to gamify the identity formation process again and again. Which Greek goddess are you? Which Dark Academia outfit should you wear? Each time spectators encounter these prompts, they engage anew, receiving a fresh identity and path towards belonging in the Dark Academia community. Participating in more activities does not clarify the picture for the spectator, but rather refigures the fleeting image of the self repeatedly and ephemerally. This ephemerality means that individuals rely on Dark Academia to varying extents in constructing their own personhood. The Reddit user @June-0R asserts that the aesthetic is ‘Part of my identity: has always been, before it got a name’. Meanwhile, on the same thread²⁹, @tageteserecta says that they are ‘just here for clothing inspiration’, and a user who has since deleted their account writes:

It’s hard to articulate my relationship to dark academia.... I’m drawn to the romanticization of learning and education. I’ve always liked the things that are associated with the aesthetic. As a little girl, I used to pretend I went to a fancy boarding school. I used to type novels on this old typewriter that belonged to my grandparents--but it wasn’t cool then!…But I don’t consider DA to be part of my ‘identity.’

People with purportedly similar experiences of Dark Academia, even those who trace their interest in the aesthetic back to their childhoods, have vastly different ideas of the role it plays in their identity formation. Like a haunting spectre, the trappings of Classics appear and disappear along with any clear sense of identity for the Dark Academia spectator.

Dark Academia uses this Classical haunting to appeal to a broad audience that may have an interest in, but little to no knowledge of, the ancient world — just like the readers of Gothic literature. Uden (87) writes the following of the Gothic author Ann Radcliffe:

[Radcliffe] give[s her content] a classicizing veneer without assuming much, if any, actual knowledge of classical texts…Far from representing any lack or failure, this vagueness becomes a powerful openness…She creates a narrative perspective easily inhabitable by readers who had little or no access to classical education, even while her descriptions of classic ‘remembrances’ create an aura that was exotic and foreign.

The classicizing veneer of Dark Academia content — leather-bound books of Latin, replica busts of generic Roman women — allows viewers to pour their own experiences into a Classical vessel. Any myth at all could be contained within the pages of one of these impeccably designed, sepia-toned tomes. The Latin and Greek textbooks that lie atop desks are often beginner level; the goddesses’ names familiar to laypeople. Like Radcliffe, Dark Academia democratizes the trappings of Classics, and by extension its prestige. Quiring argues that ‘dark academia de-exceptionalizes elite scholastic environments as much as it romanticizes them. Aesthetic blogs pair autodidacticism with a diverse and elegantly curated online community.' Not everyone can be an expert in Hellenistic sculpture, but maybe they can purchase an Athena marble planter for their desk — and that’s good enough.

The discipline of ‘Classics’ in Dark Academia

Now to turn to the haunting in Dark Academia not of antiquity itself, but of Classics as a discipline and a part of the academic institution. Holler argues that the way Classics as a field is perceived by the public is heavily influenced by idealized and romanticized depictions in contemporary literature like The Secret History (2022: 139–40). The romanticizing tendencies in Dark Academia extend from popular literature and film to actual academic study and practice: Kennedy notes that ‘students enter the classroom with a knowledge of the past that relies on representations that are not shaped by scholars or by a deep study of its realities’ (2023: 88–9). Yet at a time when enrolments are flagging and funding flows away from the humanities towards STEM fields at an alarming rate, a trend as influential as Dark Academia can be a powerful force for attracting people to engage with the ancient world. As one Tumblr user writes:³⁰

latin is the absolute worst to study but it’s also like…I’m translating sentences and looking at noun declensions and I’m listening to hozier and it’s colder than it was two weeks ago and maybe I’ll have a cup of tea soon and it’s just Oh maybe all these goddamn tables with word endings are worth it.

The lack of punctuation here, characteristic of Dark Academia text posts as of other casual, online writing, gives the sense of getting caught up in the momentum of an experience. None of the individual activities cited are subordinated to the others, but all are connected by ‘and’; ‘listening to hozier’ is just as important as dropping temperature, sentence translation, and tea consumption. Together, all these Dark Academic actions convince the narrator to continue in their study of Latin — against their better judgment, as indicated by the mild expletive ‘goddamn’.

Unfortunately, we have no statistics on how many Dark Academia fans end up studying Classics, either through enrolment in courses or through self-directed study — but the number is decidedly more than zero. A sampling of Tumblr posts under the #DarkAcademia hashtag shows convincing evidence. In one post, a user asks for advice and encouragement in their consideration of graduate school³¹: ‘Hey friends! I’m thinking about doing a Classics MA which means I need to learn basic Greek and brush up on my Latin (I studied it 4 years ago but have forgotten most things) IF anyone has any good resources/tips/encouragement please send them my way!! You’d be doing me a massive favour … Thanks!!’ The post tags #darkacademia along with #latin #greek #classics #history #deadlanguages #help #ancientgreece #ancientrome #resources #latinhelp #greekhelp #ancienthistory #ancient languages. In a post from November 2022, a user who ordered their own introductory Latin textbook — 'My Latin textbook for beginners arrives on Monday!’ —shares their excitement under the #DarkAcademia hashtag, as well as #darkacademia aesthetic, #latin language, #tsh, and #thesecrethistory.³² The concatenation of hashtags at the end of each post reinforces and equalizes the disparate elements of Dark Academia under the umbrella of the aesthetic. An academic task, like ordering a textbook, is as much a Dark Academic experience as the mere mention of the acronym of Tartt’s foundational text, an insider reference that serves to strengthen the audience’s sense of community and belonging.

Some posts even reveal that students who have enrolled in and completed Classics courses link their experience closely with Dark Academia. One Tumblr user writes, ‘just got an A (100%) in a final essay I wrote about tsh [The Secret History] for my Latin literature class, it was titled “The influences of Roman theatre in Donna Tartt’s contemporary tragicomedy”’.³³ Thus, this student’s academic paper serves as a conduit between the online world of Dark Academia and the world of the university; both comment on each other, becoming intertwined as the difference between reception and received continues to shrink. Just as Gothic literature did in its time, Dark Academia today serves as an invitation to new populations to engage with Classics, a subject that they may have previously considered too rarefied or esoteric to be within their reach.

If Dark Academia invites a new audience to the study of Classics, however, it reciprocally invites Classics to confront a new set of problems. Examinations of the subculture have critiqued its glamorization of mental illness and harmful aspects of academia, as well as its tendency towards Eurocentrism and whitewashing; the latter propensity is further illuminated by understanding the aesthetic’s ties to the disciplinary history of Classics.

Because Dark Academia is an aesthetic of romanticization, some users curate a rosy picture of unhealthy aspects of academic life. One Tumblr user self-reflectively encapsulates this tendency, writing ‘Me: *life falling apart rapidly in front of eyes*; Also me: *proceeds to romanticize the hell out of it*’.³⁴ This may be a response to the bleakness of the early days of the pandemic, when romanticization could be a coping mechanism, a balm to ease the pain of isolation.³⁵ Nevertheless, Dark Academia content continues to promote damaging behaviours, and to associate them with Classics. Posts encourage the over-consumption of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and drugs, as in the post ‘Coffee, Classics, and Cigarettes’ by @flowersforfrancis.³⁶ The hashtags below include #All I Need, #my loves, #cigarette aesthetic, and #classics.³⁷ As Zarevich (2021: 2) observes, such content ‘encourages the mindset that pulling all-nighters and subsisting on coffee and crusts of bread — raised at regular intervals to the mouth with one hand while the other hand is busy writing — is the ideal lifestyle for anyone who is truly devoted to their studies.’

Unhealthy relationships with sleep and studying are also connected to academia in posts and hashtags. One Tumblr post reads ‘How to have a sleep schedule when staying awake at night and some form of self-destruction is 25% of your personality?’ tagging #academia and #sleepless, #stress, and #tired.³⁸ Dangerously, some users even connect the neglect of their own physical and mental health with academia, and Classics in particular. A Tumblr user writes, ‘look I have reached peak DA — I am in a psych hospital in oxford doing my classics essays. Kill me?’³⁹ These sentiments can be found throughout academia itself, as scholars try to prove their mettle by being the hardest working, busiest possible versions of themselves.

Aside from health, mental and physical, other troubling associations with Classical academia appear in Dark Academia content, like the eroticization of the student/professor relationship in this Tumblr post:⁴⁰

every so often the spirit of a sapphic classics professor at oxford consumes me… and today is that day: no bra, a half-buttoned, loose shirt tucked into a pair of tweed trousers, spectacles and dark maenad curls… sprawled on the lawn with the iliad, writing fragmented poetry, dreaming of sapphic love and murder mysteries.

We see the same disjointed, fragmentary syntax that is characteristic of longer Dark Academia text posts, complete with multiple ellipses and a lack of capital letters to create a sense of disorganization and a casual tone. The description of clothing evokes a sensual disarray. In this post, the author constructs a new, queer-coded identity for herself: does she want to be this hypothetical figure, or does she want this figure? This sexualization of the Classics professor evokes an image often crafted by those describing erotic relationships between students and professors. Chae (2018) argues that the idea that education is innately erotic is ‘a natural result of romanticizing academic life to the point of conflating it with romance’, something Dark Academia certainly does. Here, the romanticization of being ‘sapphic’ leads the speaker to write fragmented poetry — but Sappho’s poetry was presumably whole when it was originally written, broken up only by the sands of time. It is the self-identification as Sapphic that is the goal, a marked engagement with the large queer population in Dark Academia circles.

This brings us to another issue with Dark Academia that implicates Classics: although its content indicates a diversity in socioeconomic status and sexual identity among curators and spectators⁴¹, Dark Academia lacks diversity when it comes to race and physical ability. Murray’s analysis of the top 100 TikTok videos tagged with #darkacademia as of November 2022 found that less than 20% of videos were made by people of colour, while my own count as of July 2023 turned up only 13% made by or featuring POC.⁴² Most content sampled featured white models, none of whom presented or discussed a physical disability. The protagonists of The Secret History itself are all white students at an elite liberal arts college. Adriaansen (2022: 112) observes that Dark Academic content ‘praises a canon of hegemonic Western, male-dominated discourse’. Murray (2023: 352) concurs, adding that posts ‘reinforce the general rule that the mid-century university experience on which DA is based had no interest in including such [non-elite, non-white] demographics. Indeed, their exclusion was a condition of the academic community’s perceived cohesion.’⁴³ By perpetuating this mid-century, homogeneous picture of Classical academia and the university, Dark Academia reinforces white supremacy in these settings, a practice in which Classics has been complicit since its origins as a discipline.

With this, we return to the idea of the double haunting. Dark Academia is haunted by a classical legacy that is itself governed by exclusionary hegemonic structures; thus, it is impossible to extricate the aesthetic alone from these structures without also disentangling Classics from its own ancestral web. The academic study of antiquity was constructed, as far back as the nineteenth century, upon foundations of Orientalism, false conceptions of ‘Western civilization’, and whitewashing of ancient Greco-Roman populations and their cultures (Kennedy 2023: 89; Haley 2009: 28). As Kennedy argues, ‘because scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity traditionally identified as white, and white supremacy was a normalized value for much of the period in which classics, ancient history, and classical archaeology developed as a discipline, the interpretive tools for translation and frameworks for understanding the people of antiquity have been filtered through white supremacism’ (2023: 100).

The relationship to Dark Academia, therefore, is difficult for those outside the white ruling class, with their own literary canons and histories of colonial oppression by the very figures and institutions extolled by the aesthetic. As Adriaansen (2022: 113) argues, we must ‘[move] beyond the inscription of disenfranchised bodies into the Western canon, as it asks for the transposition of affective Stimmung of dark academia to entirely different cultures that did not inherit a canon of Western humanism to tap into or for whom a history of colonial oppression makes it undesirable to do so.’ One Reddit user describes the complexities of Dark Academia for a member of the Latino community:⁴⁴

I’m Latino-American and there is a cognitive dissonance for me liking DA because it is like donning the colonizers play clothes. At the same time this happens to be the signifiers of respectability and tradition in the society I live in. I wouldn’t get treated the same way walking around in traditional Aztec clothing. I know a lot about European history because that’s what’s taught. My ancestors history was largely erased. I can admire the wonderful aspects of western culture without believing that ONLY white men invented everything good in the world.

This post reflects a truth pointed out by Hilless (2023): the incongruence between the ‘model’ academic and the marginalized person who enters the academic setting leads to the latter being ‘forced to change, often at great personal expense, to fit the expectations imposed on people who occupy academic space’.

Some curators, like @cosyfaerie and Tumblr users like @theacademiccottage, address this dissonance by creating Dark Academia content aimed specifically at people of colour: makeup tutorials for dark-skinned women, for example, and reading lists that highlight novels by writers of colour.⁴⁵ The hashtag #BlackAcademia arose on Tumblr in response to Dark Academia’s whitewashing tendencies, promoting visual content featuring black models; other communities have formed around Desi, Muslim, East Asian, and other marginalized populations.

Others use the #DarkAcademia hashtag to discuss ways of actively promoting a more inclusive academy. Tumblr user @soph-without-a-cause suggests ‘diverse study groups using ancient philosophies and myths to argue against modern systemic issues’ and ‘learning about the whitewashing of ancient Greece’.⁴⁶ @chaotic-autumn-songbird recommends studying mythologies from cultures outside the Mediterranean,⁴⁷ while @skylaswirls assembles a reading list of ‘classics’ by writers of colour. Classicists can work adjacently by supporting and undertaking public scholarship that seeks to provide historical context for fragmented Classical references so they are not simply symbols, but artefacts of a complex ancient society with its own problems and virtues.⁴⁸ As Uden (231–2) writes of the Gothic, ‘At a time … when the discipline of classics has shifted to discussing the often pernicious legacies of the classical world, engaging in critical analysis of the ways in which Greek and Roman texts have structured ideologies of race, gender, slavery, and colonialism, the Gothic metaphor of haunting captures better the power and influence of classical systems.’ Dark Academia, through its own Classical haunting, is one medium that can act both as a setting for and a beneficiary of this work.

Though the scholar-intellectual might wield adequate authority to reflect and reform the academic discipline of Classics, the more suitable agents for changing the dynamics of online aesthetics are the curators themselves. While a journal such as this one might be the appropriate platform for articulating to classicists the relevance of and mechanisms behind the reception of Classics in Dark Academia, social media platforms themselves seem like more apropos settings for work to be done within the online aesthetic — work that ought to be visual and curatorial, rather than written in academic prose. One way we might use our academic authority to encourage such work is by incorporating it into the classroom, where many of our students, as Papson argues, ‘are certainly more adept bricoleurs than we are’ (2014: 387). We can envision, as a final example, a course on global antiquity in which students tap into their native skills as ‘creative assemblers [who] learn by appropriating culture, dismantling and putting it back together … sampling, ripping, mashing, and remixing as well as multitasking’. One might assign an archival portfolio-based project, which recent research in digital humanities pedagogy has shown can lead to increased student engagement in the assessment and feedback processes.⁴⁹ Students can curate Dark Academia mood boards, interactive graphics and quizzes, annotated reading lists, and other media while researching the tradition behind each selected piece. They can reflect upon their curatorial principles; utilize collaborative project management and editing tools; and decide how best to convey their assemblages to spectators.⁵⁰

But amplifying a subset of online content, and even incorporating its creation and curation into the classroom, are barely small steps towards meaningfully tackling the legacy of Eurocentrism and whitewashing pervasive throughout Classics — and, therefore, throughout Dark Academia. As Padilla Peralta writes, ‘If the field is to achieve some separation from its history of racial self-referentiality it will have to create space for scholars whose embodied experiences of difference position them to target and deconstruct white-identitarian epistemics (thanks to M. Umachandran for this formulation)’ (2023: 160). This means centring the study of non-white receptions, both of Greco-Roman antiquity and of the vast world of antiquity beyond the Mediterranean, as a way of moving towards critical ancient world studies.⁵¹ Dark Academia reveals yet again that Classics is perceived by those outside the discipline as a special inheritance of modern Europe — this is nothing new (Umachandran and Ward 2024: 10). What is new, perhaps, is seeing just how many people outside the discipline — millions and billions, across social platforms and across the world—are in fact perceiving Classics — and the manifold ghosts that continue to haunt it today.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and reviewers at Classical Receptions Journal for their thoughtful feedback and advice on this piece. I am also very grateful to James Uden for reading multiple drafts and providing invaluable suggestions and mentorship, as well as for serving as a main source of inspiration for the piece itself through his monograph Spectres of Antiquity. Thanks to T. J. Bolt, Chiara Graf, Clinton Kinkade, Ximing Lu, and Rebecca Moorman for their comments and tireless support. The ideas in this piece were developed with help from the participants in the 2023 Celtic Conference in Classics panel ‘Fear, terror and horror in Graeco-Latin Antiquity and its Reception in Popular Culture’, organized by Isidro Morina Zorilla, Vasileios Balaskas, and Nuno Manuel Simões Rodriguez. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank the creators and curators of Dark Academia content, both anonymous and named, who have made this project possible by growing a global phenomenon out of the haunting vestiges of the past.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Tori F. Lee is a postdoctoral fellow in Classical Studies at the Boston University Society of Fellows. She is currently working on a book on violence and the body in pastoral literature.

References

Footnotes